Brothers in Arms
by dharmamonkey
Summary: April 1991. Six weeks after returning from Desert Storm with severe injuries suffered at the hands of his Iraqi captors, Sergeant Seeley Booth meets another soldier at Walter Reed whose life-changing injuries and indomitable will helps Booth gain perspective and begin to heal his own angry, wounded spirit. A follow-up/prequel to "Beach Therapy."
1. Chapter 1

**Brothers in Arms**

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**By:** dharmamonkey  
**Rating:** T  
**Disclaimer:** _I don't own Bones. I am, however, interested in renting Booth. A five-hour minimum would apply._

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**A/N: **_This piece is a follow-up of sorts to "Beach Therapy," which is where I first introduced First Lieutenant Sauer and Staff Sergeant Costa, who appear in this story as well. I hope you enjoy it. _

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**Chapter 1**

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I remember the day I first met Costa like it was yesterday.

It was April of 1991—April 16th, actually (I remember the date because that was the night the St. Louis Blues became only the eighth team in NHL history to come back from a three games to one deficit to win the Norris Division semifinals when they beat the Red Wings 3-2 in Game Seven)—and Walter Reed Army Medical Center was full of soldiers like me who came home from the Gulf messed up in one way or the other.

I wheeled myself into Lieutenant Sauer's physical therapy room that afternoon all charged up and ready to go. I'd finally gotten the casts off my legs and had surgery (my third since coming back from Iraq) to get the half-dozen stainless steel Kirschner stabilizing wires removed from my feet, so I was ready to start walking again. After spending six weeks confined to a wheelchair, I was nearly out of my damn mind, so when I got to the therapy room and saw that Sauer was still tied up with another patient, I was pissed.

Of course, I knew I wasn't the only soldier Sauer was rehabbing, and although it wasn't uncommon for there to be another soldier in there when I arrived for my daily appointment, that day, I was especially peeved that Sauer wasn't ready for me. Granted, I was ten minutes early for my appointment that day. I'm not usually one of those guys that's early to things, but that day, I had a really good reason: I wanted to make sure I knocked out my two-hour rehab session in plenty of time to shower, have dinner in Walter Reed's DFAC (dining facility) and go back to my room to take a nap before I rolled down to watch the game with some of the other guys in the TV room. Together with the visits from my grandfather (who drove two and a half hours down from Philadelphia every Sunday afternoon after mass with a copy of _Sports Illustrated _and a brown paper bag full of Tasty Kake apple pies—the closest I could get to a taste of home because a Genos cheesesteak with Whiz would've been a cold, gooey mess by the time he got there), the hockey playoffs were more or less the highlight of my life at that point.

"Good," I heard Sauer say to the other guy, whose face I couldn't see from where I was. There was something odd about the tone of Sauer's voice—which sounded deeper, softer and more even, the words spoken more slowly than when he talked to me. "A few more of these, Sergeant, then another exercise and then we're done."

I gritted my teeth in annoyed frustration and twirled my wheelchair in a 360°, swiveling around to shoot an angry glare at my therapist, who looked up when he heard me rattling around on the other side of the room, and I was about to roll out of the room with a disgusted huff when I finally heard the other soldier's voice.

"Heh," he chuckled just moments before he sucked in a sharp breath as Sauer bent the soldier's knee back and leaned into it, stretching the calf muscle using the same technique he'd used on me since I got the casts off my legs and the wires out of my feet. "Okay," the soldier grunted as the stretching sequence tugged at the tense muscles of his calves, quads and hamstrings, lengthening them with each of Sauer's smooth pushes. "Umm, that kinda hurts," the soldier said, his voice wavering slightly as the lieutenant slowly backed off the pressure. "Ow."

"You've been in a cast before, haven't you?" Sauer asked him. "The muscles, tendons and ligaments are usually stiff like this after cast removal."

"Well, umm..." I saw the soldier's fingers grip the edge of the table a little tighter as gave a long sigh and said, "I don't remember."

That response took me by surprise and I immediately stilled the roundabout motion of my chair as an awkward, stunned silence hung in the air between Sauer and his patient.

_I don't remember? _

Sitting in my wheelchair in front of the door some twenty feet away, I looked up and saw Sauer's eyes narrow as they rose up to meet mine in with a look of sad, quiet recognition. After a couple of seconds, he turned his attention back to the other patient, his surprise masked as his expression shifted to a sly, amused grin.

"I know you're a sniper, Booth," he called out to me, his eyes still focused on the other soldier's flexed left leg. "But you don't need to skulk around in the shadows. Come in and join us. We're almost done here."

I scowled a little at his reference to me skulking around—it was the same kind of lame cliché I'd heard a zillion times before from non-snipers—but I could tell by his smirk that he was just yanking my chain. I briefly considered telling Sauer to fuck off when the other soldier turned his head and looked at me with a faint smile and a creased brow that made him seem a little hesitant.

I'll admit it: seeing that look in the other soldier's eyes gave me a little flash of pride, knowing he recognized that I was a bad-ass motherfucker even though I was rolling around Walter Reed in a wheelchair dressed in a pair of gray PT sweats and a faded Steelers T-shirt—and that little flutter gave me the lift I needed to shrug off my annoyance and roll over to the stretching table.

The soldier on the table watched me approach with a curiosity in his dark brown eyes and a lazy, open-mouthed smile on his face that seemed to widen and relax as Sauer eased off on the stretch and took a step backwards. As I got closer, I saw that the other soldier's leg had the same tell-tale scaly, flaky, pale skin that mine did, and I knew that, like me, he'd just had a cast removed. As I rolled to a stop a few feet away from the table, I saw that he had two pink incision scars on that leg—one on his knee and the other on his ankle—and I guessed that he'd had a pretty bad leg break and had to have rods, pins, plates or whatever put in to hold his leg together the same way they'd wired and screwed my feet back together. The two of us each glanced at the other guy's scaly, scarred leg/feet for a second and then looked at each other.

Sauer looked at me and then at the other soldier, then said, "Staff Sergeant Costa, meet Sergeant Booth. Sergeant Booth, meet Staff Sergeant Costa." I could hear a dim hint of laughter in Sauer's voice and looked at him with a quirked brow, but he merely stared back with a little shrug and a smirk that came and went so quickly I'm still not sure if I imagined it.

I blinked and turned back to Costa. "Hey," I said, acknowledging him with an upward jerk of my chin.

"What's up?" he replied with a nod of his own before turning back to Sauer. "Are we done yet?"

Sauer smiled. "Almost," he said, grasping Costa's foot and gently rolling it in a semicircle, back and forth to loosen up the ankle joint.

Not wanting to crowd them or seem like I was hovering despite the fact that Sauer had invited me to join them, I rolled my wheelchair back a couple of feet, waggling it back and forth a little as I quietly watched Sauer manipulate Costa's foot and ankle for a minute. Every so often, Costa would roll his head to the the side and look at me, then our eyes would meet and he'd give a little sheepish smile, then he'd turn away again. This happened a few times before he turned and looked at me, but rather than turning away again, his dark eyes flickered as he studied me for a few seconds, then narrowed a bit. He chewed on the inside of his lip as he seemed to puzzle over what to say, then finally spoke.

"You're a sniper?" he asked me, pausing only for a beat before he shrugged and said, "I'm eleven-Mike." 11M was the designation for mechanized infantry, as distinguished from 11B (eleven-Bravo), which was my military occupational speciality: plain vanilla infantry. "I mean, I _was_," he corrected with a swallow and a fluttery blink.

I opened my mouth to answer but there was something about the sad, wistful tone of his voice that more or less took the wind out of my sails, and so I didn't say anything for a second. I wasn't sure what to say, so I sat there, grimacing in uncomfortable silence for a minute until Costa spoke again.

"First ID here," he said. The First Infantry Division, long known as the Big Red One for the symbol on their shoulder patch insignia, was the oldest unit in the U.S. Army and deployed two full brigades from Fort Riley to the desert. "2nd Battalion, 16th Infantry," he added with a beaming smile, and I couldn't help but smile a little myself at hearing his voice brighten with pride. He fell silent again, then looked up and asked, "What about you?"

"101st Airborne," I told him. "Charlie Company, 3rd Battalion, 187th Infantry."

Sauer patted the outside of Costa's thigh to get his attention. "Okay," he said. "We're done."

Costa nodded and sat up, extending his legs one at a time and wiggling his feet, chuckling a little as he leaned forward and rubbed the scaly, peeling skin on his shin with his fingertips. I could tell he wanted to scratch the itchy, weird-feeling skin there because the skin on my now-uncasted legs had been itching like hell since the day they took off my casts, just hours before I got rolled into surgery to have the stainless steel stabilizing wires removed from my busted feet. I must've made some kind of sound, because he glanced up and gave me a strange look.

"What?" he asked, pouting his lips a little before his feigned frown spread into a grin. "It itches like crazy," he said, rubbing his fingertips over the grayish flaky skin a couple of more times before pulling his hand away. "You know what I mean?"

I narrowed one eye and looked at him for a second, then laughed. "Yeah," I snorted, reaching up and thumbing the buzzcut fuzz on the back of my head as I wiggled my heels against my wheelchair's footrests. "I think I do…"

"Yeah," Costa said with a goofy, high-cheeked grin. "Guess you do."

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_To be continued_

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**A/N: **_Let me know what you think so far. To read is human, but to review is divine (and highly motivating for us writers.) Don't be shy. Share your thoughts as I've shared mine._


	2. Chapter 2

**Brothers in Arms**

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**By:** dharmamonkey  
**Rating:** T  
**Disclaimer:** _I don't own Bones. I am, however, interested in renting Booth. A five-hour minimum would apply._

* * *

**A/N: **_Thanks to everyone who read and/or reviewed Chapter 1 of this story. I'm humbled and grateful for your interest and support. So, without further ado, let's go check in on Booth and Costa at Walter Reed._

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**Chapter 2**

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Two hours later, I rolled out of Sauer's therapy room, my ratty old Steelers T-shirt soaked almost all the way through with sweat after doing all kinds of lower body exercises, including my first attempt at walking while supporting myself using parallel bars.

I'd wheeled myself into that room that afternoon thinking I'd be walking in no time flat, but after a half hour of working like hell to wobble my way from one end of the seven-foot platform to the other and back again a couple of times, I knew I was a long way from being back to the man I was before I went to war. I wanted nothing more than to get back to who I was, what I was, the _way_ I was before, and it made me angry that I was struggling to do even something as simple as walking. It was the strangest, most maddening sensation—almost as if the link between my brain and my legs had been cut and jury-rigged back together with Bondo and duct tape—and as tiring as it was to battle my body for that last half hour, what was even more exhausting and demoralizing was the realization that I was nowhere near being able to walk on my own, never mind be a soldier again.

I went back to my room and took a long hot shower. Being wheelchair bound, the first part of my physical therapy had actually been a crash course in how to do things without using my legs. Long before Sauer and I could start working on me learning to walk again, he had to teach me how to take a piss, shower, and get in and out of bed from a wheelchair. I sat there on the bench in my shower, my arm resting on the grab bar in my shower, and as I felt the throbbing ache in my feet, I reminded myself that the pain was a sign that I was finally getting down to the real business of physical therapy: getting myself back on my feet so I could get back to Fort Campbell and start living my life again.

_My life…_

I remembered laying in that prison cell wondering if that was it—if I was done, and whether I'd ever make my way back home to the life I knew before. Now I was back, I didn't want to look back.

I didn't want to look back or think about what had happened to me. I wanted to leave it all behind: losing Corporal Parker and Sergeant Matthews, getting picked up by the Republican Guard in Samawah and the days after that I spent alternating between sleeping in a puddle of my own piss on the concrete floor of a dark prison cell and getting the tar beat out of me by a sadistic Iraqi intel officer who, when he finally tired of pistol-whipping and electrocuting me, decided he wanted to break the bones of my feet into a hundred pieces, never mind the six months me and my buddies spent sweating our balls off in the Saudi desert with our thumbs up our asses waiting for someone to tell us we could go to war.

I wanted to start with a clean slate—to start over again. But as I propped myself up on those parallel bars and swung my legs forward, one at a time as I rocked from my heels onto the tender, tingly balls of my feet and felt the burn as the arches of my feet stretched after seven long weeks of inactivity, I knew that, while I'd walk again, I'd never be able to walk away and leave those experiences in the past the way I wanted to. They would be there, staring me in the face every morning until the day they laid me in the ground.

_There's no looking back, _I kept telling myself. _Head_ _down, plow forward. Don't think about what came before. Forward march. _

It might've worked, too, if it weren't for me having to spend an hour with my assigned Army social worker, Captain Marchand, three mornings a week. Those three hours were, without a doubt, the worst three hours of my week. It was like a twisted, sick, fucked up version of _This Is Your Life. _He said I could never move on from the past until I faced it head-on. Every time I met with him, he'd poke and prod, needling me to spill my guts and talk. The Iraqis tried to get me to talk by beating it out of me, but with Marchand, it was death by a thousand cuts. Every time I'd walk (well, _roll_, since I couldn't actually walk yet) out of those sessions, I'd feel mentally and physically exhausted and, though it sounds strange to think about now, physically sore the way you do when you wake up with a hangover. I hated those sessions, and if I could've taken a pass, I damn sure would have, but the fact of the matter was, I didn't have any more choice about going to those spirit-reaming, ball-busting counseling sessions with Marchand than I did about anything else at that point.

So like the rest of it, I sucked it up and tried to keep my head high as best I could.

Costa and I had agreed to meet down in the DFAC for an early dinner before the hockey game. I got to the DFAC before he did and snagged a table in the corner where we'd have some space and privacy but still be able to see everything that was going on in that dining room. I waited for about fifteen minutes and was starting to get a little pissed off when I saw him rolling in there. He had an odd, unreadable expression on his face—mostly blank and a little tired with a hint of sadness in those dark brown eyes of his. I watched him look around the room for a minute and greeted him with a jerk of my chin when our eyes finally met. A goofy, sheepish smile cracked his face as he made his way over to me, putting long, impatient strokes of his arms behind each push of those wheels. As he pulled up to the table I'd saved for us and whirled around to face me, I saw he was wearing a sun-faded Chicago White Sox baseball cap with a sharp curve in the brim where I imagined his fingers had grabbed it a thousand times to pull it over his wide, tanned forehead.

"Sorry I'm late," he said to me with a little pout that vanished from his lips as quickly as it appeared. "My, uhh, other, uhh…" Costa's voice stumbled and faded and I saw him swallow, his eyes averted as he looked away. "I had another, umm, time to...uhh, you know…" He raised his eyes again, wincing as he seemed to be wracking his brain for the word he wanted to say but couldn't find. "You know, like the times I meet with Lieutenant Sauer…I had a, uhh..."

"Appointment?" I offered, wincing a little myself as I hoped he wouldn't feel weird or insulted that I'd thrown out the word he seemed to be looking for and breathing a sigh of relief when his cheeks rose in a faint smile.

"Yeah," he said with an awkward chuckle as that smile disappeared again. "Umm, see, uhhh..." Costa swallowed, then cleared his throat. I could see discomfort and embarrassment rolling off him in waves as his bushy black eyebrows quivered over his eyes (which were so dark they were almost black and reminded me of the the shiny blackstrap molasses my grandmother would use in her gingerbread cupcakes).

I drew a breath and held it as I looked at him for a second, then glanced around at the other people in the DFAC dining room. It was obvious looking at everybody which of the patients and staff had been in the Gulf. The soldiers who deployed to Saudi Arabia for Desert Shield had developed rich brown suntans that we wore as a weird collective badge of honor that had been slow to fade even though we'd been stuck inside for the better part of the last two months as we cooled our heels at Walter Reed after being medevac'd from Iraq.

Turning back to Costa, I found myself at a loss for what to say. (_"Hey, buddy, sorry to see you got your bell rung hard enough over there that you're reduced to the vocabulary of a second-grader, but..."_)

I was saved by the bell, more or less, when my stomach growled loud enough that Costa heard it and laughed. "I'm fuckin' starving," I told him. "How about we get some chow, huh?"

After we got back to our table, the two of us ate in silence for a couple of minutes. I started to feel my cranky mood ease a bit once I had some food in my stomach, and I looked at the tables around us which had begun to fill up as the clock ticked towards six. The dining room was full of guys who'd been banged up over there. A couple of them had lost parts of arms and legs, the remains of which were still bandaged as they waited for their stumps to heal enough to be fitted for prosthetics. Another guy was sitting in the opposite corner of the room, his white cane propped against the edge of the table as he talked to his companion whose reddened, brow-less face, neck and slinged arm were shiny from the silver sulfadiazine cream they had slathered on his skin to prevent his burns from becoming infected.

_This is the part of war nobody ever sees, _I thought grimly.

I had been watching CNN the last few nights in the patient lounge and the broadcasts were full of stories about almost everything but the war: Major League Baseball finally striking a deal with the umpires to avert a strike and save the season, Michael Landon announcing he had inoperable pancreatic cancer, the United States Department of Defense announcing it was shutting down thirty-one major military installations including the Presidio and the Philadelphia Naval Yard, and Magic Johnson setting an NBA record with 9,898 career assists. The world, it seemed, had moved on from the war and those of us who were still fighting our way out of it.

I looked down at my lap and the wheelchair footrests that were supporting my weakened legs, then glanced up and saw Costa digging into a plate of baked ziti. He stabbed at his food and brought a forkful to his mouth, spilling Parmesan cheese on his navy blue T-shirt.

"Fuck," he muttered, brushing the little white speckles of cheese off his shirt and depositing half of it on his black track pants. He looked up at me with a crooked, closed-mouth grin and said, "My mom always said I was a messy eater."

I snorted. "That's nothin'," I told him as I popped a French fry in my mouth. "I once dumped half a Philly cheesesteak on my lap because I was too friggin' hungry to wait 'til I got home." I saw Costa's dark eyes light up and his mouth fall open with laughter. "I'm serious. Cheese Whiz and onions and that fuckin' greasy, delicious steak, all over my lap as I'm tryin' to eat while drivin' home. It was a fuckin' mess, man. Lemme tell ya—that Cheese Whiz shit is a bitch to get out of your jeans."

"I'll bet," he said as he chewed a mouthful of ziti.

Just being able to see Costa laugh and thinking about something other than my own misery seemed to do more to lift my mood and make me feel a bit less on edge than any of the Ativan the docs had prescribed for me.

"So you're from Philly?" he asked me.

"Yeah," I said, squooshing a fry into the salt on my plate before dunking it into the little plastic tub of ketchup. "South Philly. You?"

"Chicago," he said. "South Side. My dad and uncle run a restaurant in Greektown." He paused for a moment, then breathed a wistful little sigh. "If you like a good cheesesteak," he said, "you should try my uncle's gyro. It's the best."

I ruffled my hair, which I could feel was in dire need of a trim. I made a mental note to hit the hospital's barber shop to reup my high-and-tight, then grinned. "There's a great place in South Philly, on South Street actually, called South Street Souvlaki. It's awesome." I looked down at my Army hospital hamburger and remembered the last time I went there with my Pops, the summer before, a couple months before I deployed to Saudi Arabia with the rest of the 187th. "They had this thing I'd order every time...it was like these great lamb meatballs in a pita with—"

"_Keftés_," he said with a certain lilt, obviously saying it the Greek way. "They're called kefté kabobs. I love those things. I always put _ktipití_ on it. It's this great spicy sauce my uncle makes from feta cheese and chili peppers. That shit's good."

I looked at him for a second, unable to bite back a smile at hearing the sudden gush of energy and confidence in his voice. He even seemed to sit up straighter in his chair when he was spouting off all that stuff about Greek food.

"Aww, man," I said with a laugh, looking down at my sad little Army burger with a pout as my mouth watered at the thought of having a big fat pita stuffed with those seasoned Greek meatballs. "We gotta get the fuck outta this place so we can get some real food, huh? I mean, 'cause there's only so much of this crap a man can take."

"Hmmm," Costa murmured, poking his fork at the last couple of cheesy ziti on his place. "This...uhh...you know, this stuff's not bad, really."

I narrowed my eyes and shrugged, snatching the last French fry off my plate before pushing it and my half-eaten hamburger to the side. "Ya know," I told him with a bit of a conspiratorial tone in my voice. "The burger here's kinda _meh_ but they do have pretty good pie. I'm gonna go get me a piece. Want one?"

"Nah," Costa said as he rolled himself a few inches back from the table and patted his hand on his belly. "You go ahead. I'm stuffed."

A couple minutes later I wheeled my way back to our table with a plate of apple pie on my lap and a fork between my teeth. On the plate I'd set a small and very carefully balanced glass of milk. As soon as I reached our table, I began to unload my booty and reached into the pocket of my sweats for a little orange prescription bottle. I shook out a couple of pills—an 800 mg Ibuprofen that was big enough to choke a horse and a 20 mg prednisone that tasted so bitter I needed the damn apple pie to make the nasty mediciney aftertaste go away—and had just popped them into my mouth and tipped my head back to wash them down with my milk when I saw that Costa was just sitting there staring into his lap.

I set my glass down hard enough that it made a sound against the tabletop and Costa looked up with a sigh.

"What's wrong?" I asked him, cutting a piece of my pie with the edge of my fork as I watched him shake his head. "Hey—you sure you don't want some of my pie?" He shook his head again and looked away. "Come on, man," I said to him, not too loud because I didn't want to attract the attention of the nurses a couple of tables down from us.

He reached up and scratched his head, then breathed a long, rattling sigh as he slapped a crinkled envelope on the table. For a couple of seconds, he didn't move his hand, protecting it almost like a dog would protect a bone, but after a moment, he closed his eyes and pressed his lips together in a firm line, then pulled his hand away.

I looked at the letter for a second. "Who's it from?" I asked him.

Costa opened his eyes and looked at the handwritten return address on the letter, cocking his head to the side as he blinked and pushed the letter across the table to me. "I dunno," he said sadly. "I mean, uhhh…" I heard his breath catch in his throat as I set my fork down and pushed my pie to the side. "It looks like my buddy Tim's handwriting, but…"

I felt my own breath catch in my throat. I could see the shame shimmering in my new friend's dark eyes and it made my chest ache. "Do you—?" I reached for the letter but didn't touch it. "Hey," I said, tapping the table with my thumb as I looked down at the still-sealed envelope and then again into Costa's eyes. "Want me to help you read it?" I asked him. His dark eyes widened a little, almost as if he was surprised I'd made the offer, then he nodded and a sad smile spread across his face.

"Yes," he whispered.

"Okay," I told him, extending my forefingers as I dragged the little envelope across the table towards me. I picked it up and looked at the front. The letter was addressed to him—_SSG Jason L. Costa_—with a return address handwritten in narrow, precise, left-leaning printed letters:

_SGT Timothy J. McVeigh  
__1st Battalion, 16th Infantry Regiment_  
_Building 8025, Appenines Dr.  
_ _Fort Riley, KS 66442__  
_

"Tim McVeigh, right?" I asked him, pointing to the return address. "I mean, your buddy?"

"Yeah," he said, a bit of the sadness leeching out of his voice as he leaned over the table. "Come on," he huffed impatiently. "You gonna open it?"

I grinned at his eagerness. "Sure," I told him. "Get over here." I gestured with a soft jerk of my chin. "Come on, roll your Bradley-ridin' little ass over here and let's read this letter, okay?" His bushy brows flew up and he looked at me with a bit of surprise, then with a quick glance at the letter as I peeled open the flap with my thumb, he wheeled his way over to sit at the end of the table next to me, his back to the trio of nurses seated behind us.

"What's he say?" he asked me, his voice almost breathless as his eyes flashed bright and a wide smile stretched across his round Greek face.

"Oh, right," I said with a smirk. "I guess you wanna know, huh? Do you think I should—?"

"Yeah, you fuck," he said, punching me playfully in the shoulder as I pulled the letter out of the envelope and began to read.

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_To be continued_

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**A/N: **_So there you go. A little bit more insight into young soldier!Booth and his new friend Costa. Well, what do you think? Booth's got issues, and so does Costa (never mind Costa's friend from the 1-16 Infantry). What does the future hold for them? Well, we know what happens to Booth. And we know what happened to Costa's friend. But what about Costa himself? _

_This story has a couple of more chapters to go, but I'd love to know what you think. Share your thoughts as I've shared mine. Please leave a review._

**Editorial note: **_SGT Timothy McVeigh was in fact a member of the referenced unit, the 1st Infantry Division's 1st Battalion, 16th Infantry Regiment. Also, for those interested in the speech/language impacts of Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) of the sort that Costa suffered, the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association's website has an excellent summary of the cognitive and communication impairments that TBI can cause._


	3. Chapter 3

**Brothers in Arms**

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**By:** dharmamonkey  
**Rating:** T  
**Disclaimer:** _I don't own Bones. I am, however, interested in renting Booth. A five-hour minimum would apply._

* * *

**Chapter 3**

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After dinner, Costa and I headed over to the patient lounge to watch the Red Wings/Blues game on the big 35-inch TV.

Costa was a dyed in the wool Chicago kid and told me he didn't really care who won since his Blackhawks (who had finished the regular season at the top of the Norris Division with a record of 49-23-8) were eliminated a couple of nights earlier by the Minnesota North Stars. But because I knew a game was always more fun when you had someone to root for, I set about to talk him into rooting for the St. Louis Blues while we wheeled ourselves over to the lounge.

"I'm serious," I said as we rolled into the room. "You should root for the Blues."

"Why?" he asked me. "My boys are out."

"Why?" I rolled my eyes dramatically and leaned over the arm of my wheelchair as I gave him a teasingly disapproving look. "Come on," I said, "because Detroit is fucking obnoxious as hell and Brett Hull is awesome—fifty goals in fifty games—and, besides, the Blues are underdogs. How can you _not _root for the Blues?"

Costa shot me a strange look. "Underdogs, huh?"

I hesitated, unsure whether he didn't understand the word itself—because it was obvious to me at that point that whatever happened to him over there, it jiggled his melon in a very serious way—or if he didn't understand why that would matter to me. Not wanting to make him feel any more awkward than he already did, I decided to split the difference.

"You know," I said quietly, trying to soften the gravity of what I was saying with a grin. "Underdogs. Blues were down three games to one. Everybody counted them out and wrote 'em off, again and again, but still, they fought like hell and won two games nobody thought they'd win. They lived to fight another day. Tonight is their night, their moment of glory. It's do or die."

I looked around the lounge at the other five guys in there: a couple of them were, like us, in wheelchairs, one of whom had his bandaged leg (or what was left of it after they amputated it above the knee) propped up on a legrest; there was the blind guy we saw in the dining hall earlier who had been fitted with a glass prosthetic in one eye but still wore a bandage over the other one, which I assumed was more mangled; another guy wore his arm in a sling which seemed normal enough except for the fact that there was no hand sticking out of the sling; and another guy who also had his bandaged arm in a sling but who I guessed, based on the way the skin on the side of his neck looked, had been burned somehow.

I turned back to Costa. "You and me, and these guys, we're underdogs," I told him, my voice still a bit hushed even though the other soldiers in the room were engrossed in the pre-game rehash of the first four games of the series to hear what we were saying. "Nobody expects us to get back on our feet, you know, to make something of ourselves. That's why we're gonna prove 'em all wrong. We're gonna beat the odds. We're gonna live to fight another day." I narrowed my eyes and shot him a cocky grin. "Right?"

My friend's bushy Greek eyebrows furrowed as he thought about that for a moment, then a smile spread across his face. "Yeah, alright—I got it," he said with a nod. "Go Blues, huh?"

I reached over and clapped him on the back. "Go Blues."

With all but one of the other division semifinal series (Edmonton vs. Calgary) having wrapped up a couple of nights earlier, all the big hockey fans at Walter Reed were focused on the Red Wings/Blues game. The blind guy, Howard, was from Warren, Michigan, a suburb north of Detroit, and was a huge Red Wings fan, and although he couldn't actually _see_ the game on TV, it was obvious he had a blast listening to the announcers' play-by-play and talking some seriously hilarious trash to another guy, Girardeau, the one-handed paratrooper from the 82nd Airborne who grew up in Litchfield, Illinois, about an hour northeast of St. Louis. The game was really great, with lots of energy and back-and-forth momentum through all three periods, but I think it was as much fun listening to Howard and Girardeau bust each others' balls as it was to watch the game itself.

In the end, the Blues won, which made Girardeau a very happy man and our friend Howard, well, not so much, but we all had fun. In that couple of hours, the seven of us in that room found a tiny little escape from the reality that we all knew would be waiting for us afterwards. In that room, for that little span of time, we weren't wounded soldiers or ex-POWs. We weren't amputees or burn victims. We weren't brain-damaged, blind or mentally fucked-up. We weren't Bradley gunners or field artillerymen or paratroopers or snipers or tankers. We were just a bunch of guys sitting around watching a hockey game, drinking Cokes and eating popcorn and busting each other's balls about hockey, our hometown sports heroes and all kinds of other shit that had nothing at all to do with why we were all _there_.

The next morning, I got back from my therapy appointment with Marchand and rolled back into my room in the same kind of shit mood I usually wound up in after being put through the ringer in psychotherapy. I was so totally absorbed in the mire of my own grumbly thoughts that I wheeled right past my bed and into my bathroom to take a much-needed leak after the two big cups of coffee I guzzled before my appointment made their presence known by the sore ache in my bladder. Plopping myself back into my chair, I rolled back into my room and nearly had a heart attack when I saw an officer in a dark green Class-A uniform standing in the corner with his service cap tucked underneath his arm. My eyes instinctively flew up to his collar insignia and his name badge, at which point I felt myself go a little pale. The man in my room was Colonel Robert Clark, the commanding officer of the 187th Infantry Regiment and acting commander of the 101st Airborne Division's 3rd Brigade. _Holy shit, _I thought. _Oh God_. As soon as my heart began beating again, it began to race, and I looked down at my clothes—a light blue Phillies T-shirt with the big red "P" on the chest and a pair of gray PT sweats with "ARMY" emblazoned on the thigh. I felt my cheeks flush in embarrassment about how sloppy I looked as I puzzled over whether to salute under such circumstances. I wasn't reporting for duty (in which case I would be obliged to salute) and we were indoors, and in any event, it wasn't like I could snap to attention, since I was stuck in that stupid wheelchair.

"Sir?" I said, completely at a loss to understand why a colonel in command of a 5,000-man brigade would be standing in my hospital room.

Colonel Clark's lips curved into a little smile as he saw me squirm in mild discomfort at the awkwardness of the situation. "You'll have to pardon the intrusion, Sergeant," he said to me, setting his service cap on the table next to my bed as he pulled out the side chair. "May I, Sergeant?" I nodded mutely and wheeled around to face him as he took a seat, careful not to crowd him as I tugged my rumpled T-shirt straight. Clark looked at me for a minute, sizing me up, I suppose, then said, "I've read the reports on you, Sergeant."

"Yes, sir," I felt my belly flip a couple of times before a wave of nausea swirled through my gut. _There were reports?_

"You're a brave man, Sergeant," he continued. "No doubt one of the bravest men I've ever met."

I wasn't sure how to respond to that, so I shrugged a little and said, "Thank you, sir."

"Carrying your wounded comrade on your back 750 meters to the rendezvous point…"

My stomach sank as I remembered the smell of Parker's dying sweat and the way his blood oozed through my BDUs as I stumbled my way through the _wadi, _hoping he'd hold on for just a few more minutes even as I felt his pulse flicker and fade beneath my fingers with every step I took.

"Not two days later, covering the body of another comrade with your own to protect him from a live grenade, letting your own body be peppered with shrapnel in the process…"

_It didn't matter, _I wanted to tell him. _What I did didn't matter. He died anyway. I couldn't save him. _I remembered curling my body around Matthews', covering his head with my arm as I saw the grenade bounce towards us across the hard, sandy surface of the courtyard. I'd tucked my nose against his shoulder, using my helmeted head to cover the exposed part of the back of his neck as I jerked my leg out and kicked the grenade away, whispering in his ear _It's gonna be okay man, just hang in there _in the moments before the grenade rolled into a doorway fifteen feet away from us. The blast was partially blocked by a mudbrick wall so it only sent half the shrapnel our way that I expected it to _shhhhh it's gonna be okay, buddy _but in the end it didn't matter. By the time the Iraqi soldiers stuck the muzzles of their AK-47 rifles in my face and pulled me off of him, he was dead.

"And the four days you spent as a prisoner of war…"

He said it as if I didn't know I had been a POW for four days, although truth be told, I only found out how long I'd been held after I came out of the anesthesia in post-op at Walter Reed, because for those four days and nights, I never saw the sun, or a clock, or anything else that would help me mark the time.

_At first, all I saw was the triangular yellow, blue and red shoulder patch of the man who knelt down and pressed his fingers against my neck as he felt for my pulse. My brain felt as dense and thick as lead, and it stalled as I tried to think. _

_Triangle...red, blue and yellow...an image flashed through my mind, a memory of a war movie I'd watched with Pops as a kid..._

_First Armored...the patch was from the First Armored Division..._

_They came for me, I thought. They found me..._

_"We're gettin' you outta here, Sergeant," the medic said to me. I was curled up in a fetal position on the floor, squinting as I held my hand over my eyes because after spending much of the prior three days in darkness, I was blinded by the light that streamed into my cell through the open door._

_"You're gonna be alright," he whispered to me. I'd opened my mouth to speak to him, to the American soldier I could hear but not see, but I found myself unable to make a single sound, not even to scream in hopeless frustration, because my tongue and throat were so dry from lack of water, all I could do was move my chapped lips to silently mouth the words I wanted to say._

_"Can you stand up?" the medic asked me. I was too tired, and in too much pain—my feet, my back, my thigh, my jaw, my head, my ribs, my everything—to even nod my head no, so I just looked back at him with squinting eyes. "Alright," he told me. "We'll help you. Don't you worry, man." He sat back on his haunches and turned around, then hollered at one of his comrades. "Somebody radio HQ," he yelled. "This one's gonna need a MEDEVAC. Like right fucking now!"_

I looked up from my lap and met the Colonel's eyes. He gave me a hard, serious look, almost paternal if I didn't know any better, then leaned forward in his chair.

"There's going to be a medal ceremony, son," he said to me. "Tomorrow. You and seventeen of your fellow soldiers here will all be getting Purple Hearts for wounds sustained during combat operations in Iraq."

This came as no surprise. Unlike other military decorations, one is not nominated for the Purple Heart, but rather is entitled to be awarded it upon satisfaction of the criteria—being wounded or killed as a result of hostile enemy action.

"You will receive two such awards, Sergeant," he told me. "As well as the Combat Infantryman's Badge." This, too, did not come as a surprise. Almost every man in my battalion was going to get one of those. We were a light infantry unit deployed to a combat mission—the CIB was our memento of going to war. "The Prisoner of War Medal, of course…" I didn't even know there was such a thing and must have raised my brows in confusion because Clark then smiled briefly and nodded. "And a Bronze Star," he added, his voice completely even.

"Sir?"

"A Bronze Star with a 'V' device for valor," he clarified. "For what you did in Samawah to protect your comrade."

_No, _I told myself. _I don't deserve that. I walked away. He didn't. I don't deserve any of this. The ones who didn't come home are the ones who deserve all the thanks. Parker. Matthews. The half-dozen other guys I saw fall on our way in to capture that first objective on the 24th of February. Not me._

I was simmering in my own thoughts when Colonel Clark pushed the chair back, stood up and grabbed his service cap off the table.

"I'm sorry," he said, tucking his cap underneath his arm. "But I have a briefing at the Pentagon I must be off to. But I am very glad to have had the chance to chat with you this morning, Sergeant, and I'll be seeing you tomorrow at the medal ceremony."

I swallowed, unsure of what to say as a sick feeling still swirled in my belly. "Yes, sir," I stuttered, waggling my wheelchair around as I watched him turn towards the door. "I'll be there, sir."

"Very well then," he said with another smile and a courteous nod, then swiftly walked out of my room.

I sat there in my wheelchair just staring at that door for a while after Colonel Clark and the clicking heels of his high-polish dress shoes disappeared down the hall. For a few minutes I just smoldered in confused rage. _How did they find out what happened in that courtyard in Samawah? _I wondered. _Did Marchand tell them after I told him about it in therapy? Did somebody see what happened to us? _It didn't make any sense. The other guys in our squad who had been our overwatch when Matthews and I went into that house with the courtyard had gotten into a firefight with men from the same Iraqi platoon that ended up rushing that courtyard and taking me and Matthews down. That much I knew because it was the crackling, popping sound of small arms fire on the street adjacent to that house that had drawn Matthews and I out of that house after we neutralized the target we went in there to get. But as far as those other guys were concerned, I wasn't sure what had happened to them, but maybe one of them knew what happened to me.

I shook my head and twirled around, glancing over at the little closet in the corner of the room where a set of my BDUs hung, clean and neatly pressed along with a brand-new pair of boots that I'd asked to have sent to me from the barracks in Fort Campbell to wear when I got out of Walter Reed. Unfortunately, while I was nowhere near ready to leave Walter Reed, it looked like I'd be putting on that uniform for the medal ceremony, whether I liked it or not.

The next night, Costa and I had dinner in the hospital DFAC, the same way we had the since the afternoon two days earlier when we met in Sauer's therapy room. I was in a foul mood, and it was obvious Costa knew it from the way he hung back and kept quiet as we ate. Finally, though, the stony silence between us became too much for him to bear, and he set his fork down with an awkward clatter and gave me an exasperated look.

"Why are you so grumpy?" he asked me. "You got a bunch of medals. That's pretty cool, Booth. I mean, you got recognized for doing the things you did. I don't get it. Why is that a bad thing?"

I closed my eyes and shook my head, then sighed and covered my eyes with my hands. After a minute, I sighed again and looked up at Costa. "I don't feel like I did anything worth being recognized for," I grumbled. "My buddies got shot, I tried to save 'em but couldn't, and I got captured. That's about the size of it."

Costa stared at me, chewing on the inside of his lip as he seemed to assemble his thoughts together in his bruised brain. I'd watched him do this before, but never with the kind of angry scowl I saw on his face then. That look unnerved me far more than his silence.

"What?" I asked.

"You kinda piss me off," he told me, his words starting slow but picking up momentum. "I mean, yeah, you had some really bad things happen to you over there. A lotta guys did, but you had a lotta really, _really_ bad shit happen to you over there. But you know what? You're gonna get better. You're gonna walk again, and you're gonna be able to go back to your unit and do all the things you could before."

He looked down and away, his attention temporarily distracted as he heard the faint _tap-tap _of Howard's red-tipped cane and Girardeau's snarky banter harping on as the two of them weaved their way between tables to the chow line. I followed his gaze and watched them for a minute until Costa nudged my foot under the table.

"Howard's never gonna be the same," he said, still watching the two of them as Howard folded up his cane and set it on his tray, then followed Girardeau through the line, holding onto the paratrooper's shoulder as he listened to his friend go through the menu options. "Girardeau, too. Neither of them will be able to go back to their units." He drew a deep breath and rolled his lips between his teeth and shook his head. "You're one of the only ones, Booth, who has a chance to go back to the way things were before."

"Costa, I_—_"

"Don't," he said. "Do you have any idea what it's like? To know what you used to be able to do but…" He cleared his throat and I could see the shimmer of emotion in his eyes. "You know, to not be able to do it? To look at a book or a sign or a cafeteria menu or a friggin' issue of _Sports Illustrated_ and remember how you used to be able to read it but you can't now? To not be able to remember what you had for breakfast in the morning or what somebody just told you ten minutes ago or your parents' phone number even though they've had the same one since you were born? To not be able to think of words when you used to be able to do the whole newspaper crossword puzzle all by yourself in _pen?_"

"Look, I—"

"You _don't_," he snapped. "You're my friend, Booth, okay? But you're really starting to piss me off. You gotta get your shit together and get the hell out of here and go back to your unit, okay? Go make something of yourself. Because you _can_. I can't. I never will. That life I had before? It's gone, and I ain't never gettin' it back. So when I see you all bellyachin' about all the stuff that happened to you? I get it, okay? I get it. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy, okay? But…" He breathed a hard, rattling sigh that came out almost like a growl. "But don't make excuses for yourself. You're one of the few that doesn't have any excuses."

I sat there and stared in stunned silence.

I felt like the biggest fucking asshole that side of the Mason-Dixon Line. He was right, of course. Looking around that DFAC dining room, there was little doubt that I was one of the lucky ones. I came home with all my body parts, and although I was still a ways away from being able to walk without assistance, I had faith that I'd walk again. And as hard of a time as I was having keeping my temper in check and my emotional shit together generally, I knew I'd find a way to get through. I'd started going to the daily midday mass at the hospital chapel, and I'd been meeting with the Catholic chaplain a couple of times a week when he'd make his rounds through my ward. Whatever strength I didn't have inside of me, I thought God would be able to provide.

"I'm sorry," I whispered, my breath hitching in my throat as I felt ashamed at my own behavior. "Really, I'm—"

"No," he said, cutting me off as he closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. "It's okay, I'm just…" He drew a long, slow breath and then let it out with a quiet groan. "God, these headaches…"

I could see from the way his fingers curled around the armrest of his wheelchair so tightly that his knuckles stuck out in white relief from his hand that he was in very real pain. Here he was, struggling this way, and all I'd managed to do being an ass was to give him a migraine. _What kind of friend am I? _I asked myself.

"Hey," I said, leaning over the table and touching my hand the side of his arm, patting it gently. "You should go back to your room and lay down, okay?"

His hand fell away from the bridge of his nose and he smiled faintly through the pained tension that tightened the features of his face. "You gonna watch the game?" he asked me with a wince, his voice wavering a bit as he weathered a throbbing wave of pain. "I mean, you know, later?"

"Hey," I said with a smile. "Does a bear shit in the woods?" He grinned back, then winced again as another strong throb of pain hit him. "Go," I said, gesturing to the exit to our right with a jerk of my chin. "Get outta here and go rest…"

"Alright," he said, throwing his hands up in mock surrender before grabbing his wheels and rolling out from under the table. "Jeez."

"You'll know where to find me…"

* * *

_To be continued_

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**A/N:** _Lest anyone think this is a one-way relationship. Costa may be the one who's cognitively impaired and Booth may be the one who is struggling with symptoms of PTSD, but I hope you see how these two men are helping one another, and growing closer on account of it. This is perhaps an odd Bones fanfic, but I hope you still find it of value in contributing at least a little something to the collective hive-mind of the fic-reading fandom._

_But don't leave me in the dark. Let me know what you think. Share your thoughts as I've shared mine. In any case, thanks for reading!_

_Stay tuned. We've got 2 more chapters to go._


	4. Chapter 4

**Brothers in Arms**

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**By:** dharmamonkey  
**Rating:** T  
**Disclaimer:** _I don't own Bones. I am, however, interested in renting Booth. A five-hour minimum would apply._

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**A/N: **_Thanks to everyone for your interest in this story. Folks have been wondering what happened to Costa. I think it's time to find out. Read on and enjoy._

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**Chapter 4**

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A couple of days later, I rolled into the hospital dining room for dinner and found Costa already there waiting for me. I glanced at my watch, surprised that he had beaten me there since his afternoon appointments with his speech/language pathologist normally ran until 1600, after which he'd usually go back to his room to take a nap before dinner.

"You're early," I told him as I sidled up to our usual table in the corner of the DFAC. He was sitting there looking at a car magazine, his eyes darting around the page for a couple of seconds before flipping to the next page.

"Yeah," he said distractedly, sighing a little bit before he looked up.

Costa was wearing one of his unreadable expressions on his face—the kind that was somewhat blank and a bit glassy-eyed, with his brows raised just enough to make his forehead crinkle a little—that made it difficult to tell what exactly sort of mood he was in. As I'd come to know him, I had begun to realize that he didn't seem to express the same range of emotions that other, non-brain-injured people do. He could be pleasant and happy, but he wasn't much of a joke-teller (or joke-getter, for that matter), and something about his brain injury made it hard for him sometimes to understand the humor in jokes or interpret metaphors. It reminded me of those two-man comedy routines where there's a funny guy and a "straight" guy, and the two guys seldom swap roles. Sometimes it was a little challenging to talk to him—not in a bad way, really, but because he didn't react to things like normal people did, I had to think about what I'd say to make sure I wasn't misunderstood, since he tended to take things more literally than most people did.

"Whatcha readin'?" I asked him, reaching across the table to lift the corner of the magazine so I could see the cover. "Oh, I love _Car and Driver,_" I told him with a smile. "Have you ever seen the British magazine _Car? _It's great—awesome photography, lots of features on supercars, and this great little section called 'The Good, The Bad and The Ugly' that's really cool."

Costa responded with a disinterested grunt and closed the magazine but, instead of giving me eye contact, he stared at the front cover. The feature article was a road-test comparison of the Porsche 911 versus the Corvette ZR-1. After a moment, he drummed his fingers on the cover of the magazine and finally looked up at me.

"My brother brought it for me," he said, a faint glumness in his voice. I frowned a little at hearing him sound sad like this. Costa was usually the happy one—he was the one that had been cheering _me _up more often than not—and it bummed me out to hear him bummed out. "He came to visit today."

I leaned back in my chair and gave him an encouraging flash of my brows. "That's cool," I told him. "He came all the way out from Chicago?"

Costa shook his head. "No, this was my older brother George," he explained. "He moved to New York a few years ago, when his wife's dad got sick. He has a car repair place in Brooklyn, in…" He hesitated, narrowing his eyes as he looked away and tried to jog his memory, sighing in frustration as his brain refused to cough up the information he knew he used to know. "Williams...Williamton...I dunno, something like that," he said with a shrug of resignation.

"Williamsburg?" I offered.

Costa's molasses-colored eyes brightened as a smile cut across his face and he snapped his fingers in recognition. "Yeah," he grinned, his cheeks flushing in triumph at being able to come close to remembering the name of the area. "That's it. Williamsburg. He's on the north side, where the Italians are."

For a moment my mind drifted off as I remembered the last time I was in New York back in May 1988 when a high school buddy and I drove up to see the blues-metal band Danzig play at The Ritz, and how we'd stumbled out of our ramshackle Brooklyn motel room around eleven the following morning and had breakfast at a kosher deli in Williamsburg run by Hasidic Jews where each of us polished off two monstrous pastrami sandwiches on rye.

"Yeah," Costa said, his voice yanking me out of my dreamy daze. "It was good to see him. I hadn't seen him since I first got back from Iraq."

I reached for the magazine and, after getting a confirming nod from Costa, slid it across the table towards me. The cover article looked pretty interesting, and I wondered if my friend would mind me reading it. Unsure of how to broach the subject, I slid the magazine back over to him.

"So he's a mechanic?" I asked. "Your brother, I mean."

"Yeah," he answered, setting the magazine aside with a bit of a wistful pout, then took a deep breath and shrugged. "I asked him what he'd think about me going up there and working for him—you know, when I get out of here."

I wasn't sure what needed to happen for Costa to be deemed by the Army healthy enough to go home, or when that was expected to be. Those kinds of questions were constantly on the mind of every wounded soldier at Walter Reed, but when we spoke to each other, we never mentioned it. It wasn't that we didn't want to get out of that Purgatory, because we all did, but rather that avoiding those questions of _how _and _when _enabled us each to dodge the $64,000 question of _what: _what happens next? For most of the soldiers in our little circle—Costa, Girardeau, Howard, Marshall (a tank-driver whose left hand, arm and shoulder was badly burned when his M1 Abrams was accidentally hit by anti-tank fire from our own 210th Field Artillery Brigade during a battle) and Jankowski (a 155mm howitzer crewman who lost the lower half of his leg as a result of a cannon misfire in the early hours of the ground war)—it wasn't a question of _if_ they would be medically discharged from the Army, but _when._ The more sobering question remained: _what happens now?_ That question loomed everywhere around us, and had no answer, so we had all been content to let it lie unasked for a little bit longer. But the more time that passed, the harder it was to ignore the niggling truth that most of us would never return to active duty.

"You know," he continued, his voice soft and almost a little distant as if he were less talking to me than thinking out loud. "I joined the Army to save money so I could go to college. Now…" He grunted out a grim laugh. "Now, I'm gonna get bounced from the Army, and there's no way I'll ever go to college. I'd flunk out in about three seconds."

My heart ached for him. "I'm sorry, man," I said, unsure of what else to say. I wanted to tell him something that would make it better, but what do you tell a man whose life's dream has been extinguished? I had no idea what I could possibly say to console that kind of a loss. So I just listened.

Costa took a deep breath and swallowed, and I knew from the way his eyes narrowed a little and his mouth hung open that his mind had traveled back to another place. A gravity hung between us as he rolled his lips between his teeth and shook his head, then after a minute began to speak again. "It's funny, you know," he said, his dark eyes looking at something, or someplace, over my right shoulder as he spoke. "I'm not even sure what we hit. I mean, the guys from the 1st Engineer Battalion were supposed to have gone in there and cleared the mines, you know, but I guess maybe they missed one, or maybe we hit an unexploded tank shell or something...I dunno... "

It was strange listening to him as he began to tell his story. For better or worse, I never really had to suck it up and find a comfortable time and place where I could open up to Costa about what happened to me—at least, not the way he was doing then—because the basic outline of what had happened to me was laid bare for Costa and everyone else at the medal ceremony earlier that week when Colonel Clark read my Bronze Star and POW medal citations. Listening to my friend quietly sift through his memories as he told his story, I felt glad in a way that he knew that I had been through shit, too, if that meant it made it easier for him to unload the story of what had happened to him.

"I was a Bradley gunner," he said, his voice punctuated with a sadness that made his statement sound like a confession.

The 1st Infantry Division was a mechanized infantry unit, and its main combat elements rode into battle using M2 Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles, heavily armored tracked vehicles manned by a driver, a commander and a gunner and carrying a squad of six infantrymen. As a gunner, Costa's job was to man the vehicle's main weapon, the 25mm canon, which meant he rode in the Bradley's turret, his head and shoulders exposed above the vehicle's armor so he could see and operate his weapon.

His eyes seemed to lose their focus and just stare indistinctly in my general direction as the memory all of a sudden gushed from him in a breathless jumble of words.

"We were just goin' along, you know, executing a flanking maneuver with the three other Bradleys in 2nd Platoon, and the commander of my vehicle, Sergeant First Class O'Hare, had just relayed some instructions to the driver when all of a sudden there was a hard jolt and a big flash, and the whole thing flipped. I was thrown from my turret, or that's what they told me, 'cause I don't really remember anything after feeling that jolt and feeling the thing flipping over."

Still, I didn't know what to say, but I wanted him to know I was listening.

"Aww, buddy," I said, cocking my head sympathetically as I watched his dark gaze flutter and imagined the memory flashing before his mind's eye.

Costa tipped his ballcap up a little and thread his fingertips through the inch-long scallop of hair over his brow, then pulled it down over his forehead and sighed again.

"I can't remember anything else until I woke up here," he said, his eyes finally swiveling over to meet mine. "Ten days later..."

He pulled his White Sox ballcap off and turned his head to the right, then pointed at the jagged pink, question-mark shaped scar along his left temple, just above the hairline. His black hair had grown back over the area where they'd shaved him for surgery all those weeks earlier, but no hair grew where the incision was.

"I fractured my skull, and they took a blood clot out of my head the size of a ping-pong ball," he told me. After a few moments, he looked down at his lap and added, "And put a steel rod and screws in my leg to put it back together, too." He looked up at me and smiled. "I gotta go back in there in a week or two so they can put that chunk of my skull they took out back in again."

_Holy shit, _I thought.

"Dude," I said, buoyed by the smile on his face. "So you, uhh, actually don't have skull under there?" I asked, pointing to my own temple with my finger.

Costa laughed. "Nope," he said, tapping his forefingers against the area above his ear. "Not in that little spot."

"That's, uhh…" I couldn't help but laugh a little at the idea of it. "I mean, wow."

He gave a sheepish little shrug but didn't say anything for a minute. His eyes wandered over to the cover of the _Car and Driver _on the edge of the table, and he stared at it for a moment, then breathed a heavy sigh.

"They got me doing all these memory exercises and stuff," he said. "And trying to help with my reading. I guess it's helping a little, you know, but…" He closed his eyes and fell silent for a beat, then opened his eyes again and looked at that magazine. "I'm never gonna go to college, Booth, you know, or anything like that. I can cry and wish it was different, but that ain't gonna change anything. I'll keep workin' on it, you know, but...it is what it is. Shit happened, and I can wish it had gone different for me, but…" He raised his hands and shrugged again. "All I can do is accept it, right? Do what I can, with what I've got, and...all the wishing in the world isn't gonna change anything."

He was right, but saying it that way made my heart break for him.

"So you're gonna go work for your brother fixing cars?" I asked. "That's cool. That was kinda my hobby, you know, in high school. When I wasn't at school, or playing sports, I was fixing up old cars. Recruiting sergeant back in Philly tried to talk me into going in as a ninety-one Bravo, 'wheeled vehicle mechanic,' but I basically told him to fuck off, that I wanted to be in a rifle company, not the damn motor pool in the rear with the gear." I leaned over the table and chuckled, then said in a low voice, "Though, all things considered, I might've been better off fixing trucks, though, huh?"

Costa thought about that for a moment. "Yeah, probably," he said, the humorous irony of that statement somewhat lost on him. "So, what about you? I mean, what are you gonna do, once you get yourself together and your feet all better?"

There it was—my $64,000 question. That single question had consumed more of my waking hours than any other as I went through therapy (physical and otherwise), and after all those weeks, a lot of soul-searching and a not-insignificant amount of prayer to the Virgin Mother and Saint George, the patron saint of soldiers, I knew the answer.

"I want to be a Ranger," I told him.

From the silence that hung between us in the seconds after I said it, you might have thought I told him I wanted to run away and join the circus. Finally, though, that warm smile of Costa's widened across his face and his bushy black brows arched over his gleaming eyes.

"Really?" he asked with a surprised laugh. "A Ranger?"

I shot him a little scowl of mostly-feigned hurt. "Yeah, a Ranger," I said. "Why?"

"I mean, I dunno," he stuttered, leaning back in his chair. "I just—that's awesome, man. Why Rangers, though? I mean, my friend Tim—you know, the one who wrote me that letter? He's at Camp Mackay right now doing his first phase of training for Special Forces. Why go Rangers if you can be SF?"

It wasn't a dumb question, actually. I'd thought about it myself. The U.S. Army Special Forces (Green Berets) and the U.S. Army Rangers had different operational missions. The Green Berets specialize in unconventional warfare—guerrilla warfare, more or less—and traced its origin back to the OSS in World War II which sent small teams of men into strategic places like Burma to lead indigenous forces in an insurgency against the occupying power, and even today, their primary mission is to lead and train other forces rather than be a spearhead of direct action. The Rangers, on the other hand, are an elite airborne light infantry force deployed to spearhead direct combat operations. Green Berets help other people learn to fight their own wars, but the Rangers are the tip of the spear when America went to war in its own name. There was something about the Ranger mission that seemed more straightforward and direct to me. The Ranger motto was _"Rangers lead the way!"_ and that's what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a warrior, to fight for my country, and to be the best among the best. But I wasn't sure how to explain all that to Costa.

"I dunno, man," I said. "I don't think the Green Beret gig is my thing, but _Rangers lead the way, _buddy, that's what I want. I love the infantry. I like the idea of being the first boots on the ground—high speed, low-drag and all that shit—but still being part of the main mission, if you know what I mean."

He gave me a bit of a nonplussed look and I wasn't sure he did understand what I meant, but he didn't press me further, so I let it lie just as it was.

"But first things first," I said with a wink. "I gotta get out of this fucking chair. And you know what the next step of _that_ process is?"

Costa's brow furrowed and he thought about it, pursing his lips as he presumably considered what he knew about his own physical rehabilitation process.

"I dunno," he said. "I guess, umm, well—"

I smacked my hand on the table and smirked as he jumped a tiny bit at the sound.

"Dinner," I said with a big grin. "Nothing happens unless we get off our keisters and go get some fuckin' chow, so grab your cap and let's vamoose. I'm so hungry I could eat a friggin' horse."

Costa snatched up his ballcap and put it on, then gestured towards the chow line with a quick jerk of his chin.

"Lead the way," he said with a laugh and a wink of his own.

* * *

**A/N: **_Now you know what happened to Costa, and what his plan is going forward. And we all know how things fell in place for Sergeant Booth, more or less, as the years moved on. So, what does the fifth and final chapter have in store for us? Hmmm. I don't know. Are you sure you really want to know? Do you? *smirk*_

_I think I can coax my muse into kicking out that last chapter in the next couple of days. I think you'll like where I leave this. But help me coax my muse. __Let me know what you think so far. _Lurkers, it's time to show yourselves and say hello. For those who've reviewed previous chapters, I thank you. Your feedback means more to me than you'll ever know. 

_In any case, thanks for reading! _


	5. Chapter 5

**Brothers in Arms**

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**By:** dharmamonkey  
**Rating:** T  
**Disclaimer:** _I don't own Bones. I am, however, interested in renting Booth. A five-hour minimum would apply._

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**Chapter 5**

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Most days I'd wear a suit and tie to work.

But that morning, instead of reporting for duty in the bullpen of the FBI's Newark Field Office, I was decked out in tactical gear—a black FBI T-shirt and matching ripstop cargo pants bloused into black combat boots. I was standing in a hotel room in Hoboken with five other agents being briefed in preparation for an arrest warrant we were going to execute that morning at the nearby office of a real estate developer who we suspected was involved in laundering money for the Elizabeth, New Jersey-based DeCavalcante crime family.

I'd graduated from the FBI Academy in February of 2001, and despite my request to be assigned to the Washington D.C. Field Office because that's where my then-pregnant ex-girlfriend was living, I was instead assigned to the organized crime unit in Newark. I didn't mind the assignment itself (hell, there was a part of me that kind of liked dealing with the wiseguys), but I really, really hated being that far away from my infant son.

Rocco, the Supervisory Special Agent in charge of the arrest operation, had just finished briefing us when his cell phone rang. As soon as he flipped his phone open and answered, the color drained from his face and we all knew that, whatever it was, it wasn't good. I felt a sick sense of foreboding as Rocco ran over to the window and yanked open the shade. The hotel room looked eastward across the Hudson River and all of our eyes were immediately drawn to the plume of ugly black smoke billowing from the World Trade Center's North Tower.

_Oh God, _I thought. _What is happening?_

We were still in that hotel room, awaiting instructions as to whether we were going to execute that arrest warrant or stand down, when we saw the second plane hit. In ten years of Army service, I had seen a lot of horrifying things—the sort of things that gave me nightmares and kept me from falling back asleep afterwards—but I had never, ever experienced anything as horrifying as seeing one of the towers burning from an aircraft strike and, not fifteen minutes later, watching a second plane hit the other tower. More than 50,000 people worked in the Twin Towers, and every agent in that hotel room stared out that window knowing that whatever happened that day, we sure as hell weren't going to be executing that arrest warrant for that money-laundering real estate developer.

When we learned that a third plane had hit the Pentagon about a half hour later, we were told to standby for further instructions. We were still standing by—damn near crawling out of our skins with horror and utter frustration—and staring out the window when we watched the South Tower collapse at 9:59. Every one of our six hearts stopped as we watched the South Tower sink below the horizon. For a few seconds, I couldn't even speak, so immense was the anguish I felt at the thought of how many lives had been extinguished before my eyes.

The six of us ran down the hotel stairs and piled into an FBI-issued Tahoe as soon as we saw the South Tower fall. _Fuck the arrest, _we silently agreed. _There's people dying over there. _We had just pulled out of the Holland Tunnel and were heading down Varick Street towards Broadway when the North Tower collapsed, sending an unimaginably large cloud of dust and debris rolling up the street and more or less leaving us in a man-made whiteout. We ditched the Tahoe in the parking lot at the NYPD's 1st Precinct in Tribeca, grabbed the first aid kits out of the back of the truck, and made our way to the World Trade Center on foot.

I spent the next twelve hours at Ground Zero (which those of us at the scene called _the Pile_) until I was ordered by a supervisor from the New York Field Office to stand down around midnight. Exhausted, I stumbled a couple of blocks to St. Peter's Roman Catholic Church on Barclay Street, where I crashed on the floor with a dozen other first-responders and rescue workers. I woke up after three hours, sore and exhausted but determined to get back out there. I took a few minutes to pray, then had a quick breakfast of black coffee and a donated bagel before wandering my way back to the Pile where they were still pulling survivors, badly wounded but miraculously alive, out of the rubble.

Around noon that second day, firefighters pulled a young Port Authority clerk named Genelle from the rubble where she'd been trapped under steel and concrete for twenty-seven hours. I was working nearby with a pair of firefighters from Jersey City and a team of ironworkers from the union hall in Elizabeth, and when we saw that woman pulled out of the rubble alive, our hearts swelled with hope that there would be more. So we continued to work, cutting through structural steel and concrete, clearing away the crumbled remains of New York's most visible landmark, hoping against hope that we would find more like her, survivors who we could unearth to safety.

But we found none.

All we found was death and destruction on a scale that I never thought I'd ever see. Though I was there to help keep an eye out for evidence—since the Pile was not just a scene of tragedy and destruction, but also a crime scene—I was also, at least until it became clear that there was no more rescue possible because there was no one left alive to be rescued, a rescuer.

We kept going, though, working amid the heat and the dust and the horror as the afternoon faded into night. Even when it became obvious that there was no hope we would find any more survivors, we labored away with the same energy as we had before until we could barely stand. As we pulled people and parts of people out of the shattered remains of the Towers, I came to believe strongly that the dead deserved to be found no less than the living. And so we worked in silent, solemn devotion, long after we resigned ourselves to the fact that the Pile was now a giant mass grave.

At 9:00 that night, after working for thirty-one hours with only the three hours of fitful sleep I snagged, I finally left the Pile and hitched a ride across the Brooklyn Bridge in the back of an ambulance that was transporting a firefighter with breathing problems to Maimonides Medical Center.

Once I got to Brooklyn, I hitched another ride up to Bedford-Stuyvesant on the north side of the borough. I was so tired, I could scarcely think straight, but somehow, I remembered the address. Although I'd cleaned most of the dust off my face, arms and hands with baby wipes I'd gotten from the EMTs who I rode over with, my black tac pants, boots and T-shirt were gray from the dust that clung to me, and the only reason it wasn't in my hair was because one of the Jersey City firefighters gave me one of his ballcaps to wear.

I rang the buzzer and stood there looking like a dusty rendition of death warmed over. I looked like hell, and I wasn't sure he'd recognize me. We hadn't seen each other in several years (not since I came up to see him for a few days after I came back from a deployment in Guatemala in late 1994) and it wasn't like he was expecting me. I heard footsteps approach the door then stop, and the dim light behind the peephole darkened then, after a couple of seconds, brightened again. Another couple of interminably long seconds passed before the door creaked open.

I yanked off my ballcap as soon as I saw his eyes—those same shiny almost-black, dark as molasses eyes that had kept my spirits up and kicked me in the ass back at Walter Reed all those years ago—and despite how bone-tired and heart-weary I was after two days at the Pile, I couldn't help but grin like a fool at the sight of him.

"Booth?" he whispered, his eyes narrowing briefly then widening again as he took in the sight of me. "Sweet Jesus, you…" He stepped out onto the stoop and put his hand on my dirty, dusty shoulder and pulled me into the doorway of the three-story brownstone.

As soon as the door shut behind me, he fell into me and wrapped his arms around me in a big bear hug.

"Costa," I coughed out a laugh as he clapped my back and squeaked, "Hey, you really don't wanna…" He clapped my back one more time and pulled away, looking down at his own navy T-shirt which was now lightly dusted with the dirt that covered me. "I'm covered with the stuff and God only knows how bad I smell," I said, unable (despite everything that had happened) to keep from beaming at the sight of my old friend standing in front of me.

"You _do_ smell," Costa said with a small smile, then gestured for me to follow him into the kitchen. "You always were a sweater, though." He pulled out a chair on the end of the kitchen table and pointed to it, then walked over to the refrigerator. "I'd offer you a beer if you want one, but I'm guessing you probably just want something cold and light to drink right now."

Plunking myself down in the chair, I leaned back and just relaxed into the welcome sensation of sitting on a padded seat for the first time in days. "Water, Coke, Gatorade, beer, OJ, whatever," I sighed. "It's all good."

I curled the brim of the dust-covered, sweat-logged ballcap then set it on my knee and just stared at it for a second. It was dark blue with _"FDJC Ladder Company 3"_ embroidered on the front and the words _"Jersey City Fire Department" _were embroidered in an arch over the snaps on the back.

Costa placed a tall glass of lemonade in front of me, then cracked open a couple of beers and sat down next to me. "If you don't want to drink one, I'll have 'em both," he said. "Lord knows I won't be sleepin' much tonight."

Whether it was because I was thirsty after sweating under the sun and working in the rubble (where there were a lot of hot spots where the debris still smoldered more than thirty-six hours after the Towers collapsed), or because I wanted to wash the itchy, scratchy, tickling sensation out of my throat—or maybe both, I don't know—I picked up that pint glass of lemonade, tipped it back and drained the whole thing in three big swallows. I set the glass down hard, harder than I'd intended to, but every single one of my muscles ached and I was so totally wiped, I didn't have the energy to even be coordinated with a task as simple as setting a glass on a table. I stared at the green and yellow logo of the Brooklyn Brewery emblazoned on the side of the glass and thought about how those colors seemed awfully bright compared to the pale dust and ash that blanketed everything in Manhattan south of Chambers Street.

After a minute, I shrugged off my daze and looked up again only to find Costa leaning into his arms and rocking the crimped glass bottom of his half-empty bottle of beer over the vinyl table cloth. I reached for the other bottle of beer and brought it to my lips, sighed, then took a long sip.

As soon as I set the bottle down again, Costa turned to me and said, "It's bad down there, huh?"

"Worst thing I've ever seen," I told him as I brought my beer up for another sip. "I've seen a lot of pretty bad things over the years, man, but this—this is worse than the worst nightmare I could have imagined. It's…" I tipped the bottle back for a long draught and swallowed, holding the bottle of Brooklyn Brewery Summer Ale in the air for a moment as I thought about what I'd been through the last two days. "It's...just...it's just really bad...so many people, so many lives...so many families...I mean, it's amazing to see people stepping up and helping out down there, but it's just so sad and so...I dunno...soul-suckingly immense...the scale of it."

Costa rubbed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose, and I wondered—remembering how he used to do that when he would get his migraines when we were at Walter Reed together—whether he still suffered from those headaches. Maybe because I had been spending the last two days looking for signs of human life, or maybe just because of the way the light hung over his kitchen table, my attention was suddenly drawn to the white gold wedding band on his finger. It made me smile to know my friend, who had struggled to find his way in the world after an anti-tank mine took away his dream of going to college and being an architect, had finally found love. I glanced to my left at his refrigerator and saw kids' drawings hanging on the door, held up by little colored plastic alphabet magnets. One of them had _"I love you, Daddy" _scrawled underneath a rainbow next to a very puffy looking tree with an orange trunk, and another had a stick-figure guy with big black eyes and what looked like a red cape flying over turquoise-blue waves and said _"Super Dad_._"_

It made me think of my little boy, Parker, who was just six months old and living with his mom in D.C. I missed him so much and I'll admit I felt a little pang of jealousy that Costa seemed to have, in a way, the kind of life I wanted for myself. Maybe I was more "successful," in the traditional sense, but as I sat there at my friend's kitchen table looking at his wedding ring and cute kids' crayon scribbles on the fridge, a part of me wanted what he had.

"It's crazy," he said, his voice somewhat distant as he closed one eye and stared into his beer bottle. "Nobody's heard from Kelly's brother's sister-in-law—I mean, my wife's brother's wife's sister—since she went to work on Tuesday. She's a secretary for Marsh on the 95th Floor of the North Tower." Costa drew a long, heavy breath and sighed. "They're saying that's right where that one plane hit." He pressed his lips together in a firm line and shook his head. "She's gone, you know. We just...they're saying nobody above the 91st Floor got out."

"I'm sorry," I whispered.

He swallowed, then continued to speak, his gaze set on the red and white checkered vinyl tablecloth but clearly unfocused as he spoke. "There's a guy who works with me and George at the shop, a young guy—Julio—he's maybe twenty-one or twenty-two years old. He's our detailer. Good kid. His dad was NYPD, right? 1st Precinct. And his girlfriend worked at Windows on the World. Both gone. He's wrecked."

My heart ached for him and for his family and friends. I was relatively new to the New York area, and I didn't personally know anyone who worked in the Towers. The pain I felt working down at the Pile was different than the kind of pain I heard in my friend's voice: for me, not to sound callous, but the pain was more abstract, maybe, I don't know, existential. But for Costa, he knew people. It was a different kind of real for him than it was for me.

"I can't imagine," I told him. I really struggled to imagine what it would feel like to experience that kind of loss. Though we were a long, long way from recovering all the bodies of those lost that day—and I was beginning to suspect there were going to be people we never found—we knew that there were organizations like the NYPD, FDNY, and companies like Marsh McLennan and Cantor Fitzgerald that lost hundreds of people in the Twin Towers. It was like the Army losing an entire company of soldiers in the blink of an eye. The scale of loss and suffering was so vast that I couldn't get my mind around it. I could only comprehend it by thinking of the individual people lost, but to do that filled me with despair. I couldn't help but think, as I was standing on that monstrous heap of twisted steel and broken concrete, how many children were now without a father or mother, or (God help them) both.

"It made me think of Oklahoma," Costa said.

The word _"Oklahoma"_ hung in the air between us, heavy and pregnant, for a minute as we both remembered the morning in question—April 19, 1995—when Costa's fellow gunner from the Big Red One's 1st of the 16th, Timothy McVeigh, detonated a Ryder truck in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City and killed 168 people.

"You know they interviewed me," he said. "The FBI, I mean. They found a couple of my letters somewhere in a storage unit someplace in Kansas and so, out of the blue, I get these stern-looking guys in black suits with dark ties—you know, like Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith in _Men in Black_—knocking on our door and asking about Tim: how I knew him, did we hang out together and when, and what did we talk about. They ran through our phone records, contacted the super of the building we were living in at the time and wanted to know all kinds of stuff about me, and they called me into their headquarters in Midtown and interviewed me for two solid days about him until they finally decided I really didn't know anything."

"They came to me, too," I told him. "I was at Benning at that point. Bravo Company, 3rd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment. I'd just got back from a fourteen-day training rotation at Camp Merrill like, I dunno, two days earlier and I get called in to talk to the company CO. I thought I was in some kind of deep shit because I went out and got drunk with a couple of the other guys and came back in after curfew with tattoos on the insides of my wrists." I extended my arms and showed him my tattoos. "I damn near shit myself when I got to the CO's office and there are two MPs and two guys in three-hundred dollar suits with badges on their hips."

Costa frowned. "I don't understand why they did that," he said. "I told them you were only mentioned in my letters because you were my best friend at Walter Reed, and that, yeah, you helped me write those letters to Tim, but that you didn't even know him."

"Hell if I know," I shrugged. "I'm sorry, man." I could hear in his voice how the whole thing still troubled him, so I wasn't about to tell him I had to go through a second round of the third degree when I applied to the FBI and that it delayed the processing of my application packet for a couple of months. "I really am."

After a second, as if he hadn't heard my comment, he said, "I didn't really know Tim. I thought I did, but..." Another long, pregnant silence hung between us before Costa began to speak again. "I was a city kid," he said. "You know, so I always figured that Tim being into guns and shit was because he was from West Bumville, upstate New York. I mean, a lot of guys in the Army are into guns. Half the fucking infantry is. And I always thought he wore those freaky White Power-type T-shirts just to be a rebel, to challenge the authority of the guys in charge and be a pain in the ass." He paused again. "We weren't close," he explained. "We were Bradley gunners in the same company. We didn't even really hang out all that much, because he was kind of a loner and, well, as time went on, he spent more and more time with his guns. And then..."

He abruptly stood up and pushed his chair away from the table, then opened the fridge, glanced over his shoulder and asked, "You want another one?"

I looked at my watch. "Okay," I agreed. "One more." I'd been ordered by the FBI's on-scene coordinator not to return until noon the next day. Costa slammed the refrigerator door shot and I heard the _crack, whfft _sounds of two light beers being opened as he took his seat next to me again.

"His letters got weird after he dropped out of Special Forces training," he said. I remembered reading one of those letters to him and how, at the time, it did seem a little off the deep end, but considering all the shit that was going through my head at that point, I'd felt I wasn't in a position to judge anyone else for being unstable.

"They were all angry and, well, kind of paranoid and just freaky. I mean, looking back on it all now, he was kind of a weird guy, but I didn't put all the pieces together until…" His voice trailed off for a minute. "George and I were in the shop watching TV while we were sweeping up that next afternoon, you know, after the bombing, and CNN had the FBI sketch of John Doe Number One. I remember telling my brother that it looked a lot like an old Army buddy of mine but, hell, there are a lot of tall blond guys running around with crew cuts, so I figured it was just a coincidence. I never thought that...I dunno..."

Costa fell quiet again and, after a second, realized he still had two beers in front of him. He handed one of them to me with a shrug. Accepting the beer with a smile, I looked down at my dusty cargo pants and then extended my hand, wiggling my fingers as I saw the dirt packed under my fingernails and clinging to the wrinkles at each of the joints.

"You can stay here tonight," he said, his voice quiet as if he didn't want to disturb my dazed reverie. "However long you like, really."

"Thanks," I said. "I mean, I live in Piscataway but getting back thataways right now would be kinda tough, and, well, I'm still needed down there..."

Costa smiled. "Hey, don't worry about it. We got an extra bedroom upstairs. It was my mother-in-law's but we kind of use it as an office now and—"

"Daddy, I can't sleep," came a voice from behind us. I turned around and saw a five year-old boy standing in the doorway behind me.

"I'm sorry," said a woman's voice as I saw an arm and then her head emerge from behind the doorway. "Oh, hi," she said with a kind if somewhat awkward smile as our eyes met. She bent over and grabbed the boy gently by the shoulders. "Sweetie, can't you see Daddy's talking to his friend right now?"

She stood up to her full height and tucked a lock of her hair behind her ear as her gaze flitted from the boy to Costa to me and back to the boy. For a second I was a little stunned by how gorgeous Costa's wife was. I mean, sure, Costa's a good-looking guy—in that swarthy, bushy-browed, hairy-knuckled, five-o'clock-shadow-at-two-in-the-afternoon kind of way—but his wife was a total knockout with her hazel eyes, long brown hair and high cheekbones. She reminded me a little of Angelina Jolie in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. I smiled at her and turned to look at Costa, who was more focused on his sleepy, brown-eyed boy than on his wife. _Good for you, man, _I thought to myself as I watched the three of them.

The little boy, who looked like Costa's five year old Mini-Me, walked up to his father with a sad, frustrated pout on his face and rubbed his dark, watery eyes with his little fist. "I can't sleep, Daddy," he repeated. "I keep thinking about the buildings falling down and all the people who got hurt."

"Aww, buddy," Costa said, looking at his son with shimmery, sympathetic eyes. He patted his thigh and invited the boy to sit on his lap. The boy seemed to finally notice me and gave me a curious look, then climbed on his father's lap. Costa snaked his burly forearms around his son's waist and pressed a kiss to the boy's temple. "It's okay," he said. "Do you want some milk and cinnamon crackers, kiddo?" he asked.

The boy nodded mutely, and Costa shot his wife a look. She walked past me, brushing her fingers across my shoulder as she walked by.

Costa's son turned and looked over his shoulder at his dad as Kelly reached into the cabinet and pulled out a box of Honey Maid cinnamon crackers. "Daddy," he said. "Does your friend want to have milk and crackers, too?"

"I dunno," Costa said with a grin. "Want some crackers, Booth?"

Kelly set a small plastic plate of crackers on the table and turned to me. "If you're hungry, I can fry up some eggs or something," she said with an appraising look. Her eyes lingered for a moment on the white "FBI" screen-printed on the chest of my dirty black T-shirt. I looked down at myself and felt sort of bad being a walking dust-bunny in her immaculate house. "I imagine you're hungry," she said.

I picked up my beer and shrugged. "You don't have to do that," I said. "Really, it's—"

"You look famished," she said, her voice insistent but there was something vulnerable in her eyes that begged me to let her help me, as if somehow frying up a couple of eggs for a late-night dinner was a way for her to do something for the recovery effort, however small. "I can toast you an English muffin or a bagel. You pick. How do you take your eggs? I'm not letting you leave this kitchen until you eat, okay?"

I laughed. Her insistence on feeding me reminded me of my Nan, who was the very definition of an Italian grandmother. Food was love and whenever I was in her kitchen, I always felt very, very loved. I felt that same kind of warm maternalism rolling off of Kelly in waves and I knew I was helpless to resist her offer.

"Over medium," I told her with a grateful smile. "And an English muffin's fine."

She set a coffee cup with milk in front of her son and turned back to the refrigerator. Glancing over her shoulder, she asked, "Two eggs or three? I'm going to guess you're a three-egg man, Booth."

I shot Costa a teasing, narrow-eyed look. "You been tellin' tales out of school about me, buddy?" I asked him as I watched his son dunk his cinnamon graham crackers into the mug of milk. The boy used the same system I did when I was a kid: he'd dunk a cracker, hold it up for a second as the milk soaked in, then took a bite of the softening cracker just before it fell apart in his hand.

Costa winked and smiled mischievously as he waited for his son to finish eating a cracker before he gave the boy's arm a gentle squeeze. "Hey Joey," he said to the boy. "You wanna meet my friend?"

The boy stared at his plate of crackers for a moment as if deciding whether he'd rather snack or talk to me, then looked up at me with those big brown eyes of his, which I realized where a shade lighter than his dad's. "Were you in the Army with my daddy?" he asked me.

"Yeah," I said with a smile, holding my beer in my lap, between my legs. "I was."

Tousling the boy's hair, Costa said, "You and my friend Booth here have something in common, you know."

Joey narrowed his eyes and thought about that for a second, then his eyes widened and he asked me, "Do you like cinnamon crackers, too?"

"Well," I laughed. "I do, actually, though it's been a really long time since I've had one." Joey slid his plate across the table towards me. "Oh, no, that's okay—I think your mom's making me some eggs and I don't want to spoil my appetite. But thanks for the offer."

The boy scrunched his nose. "Eggs are for breakfast," he declared. "Not for snacks."

I thought about that for a second, wondering if this was a dry run for the day when my own little son would someday be asking me how on earth someone could have eggs for dinner and cold pizza for breakfast.

Costa pat the side of his son's thigh to get his attention then pointed at me. "That's my friend, Seeley," he told him.

"Umm." Joey furrowed his bushy little brows in confusion. "Your name's Seeley, too?"

I jerked my head back and blinked. _Wait, what?_

My friend whispered in his son's ear, nudging him once before the boy finally nodded. "My name's Joseph Seeley Costa," he told me. "Everybody calls me Joey, though. What's your name?"

I felt my chest swell with warmth and couldn't suppress a smile as I beamed at my sweet, cheeky little Greek namesake. "My name's Seeley Joseph Booth," I told him as I turned to Costa with an incredulous look.

Joey thought about that for a second, then said, "Hello." He pulled his plate of crackers back towards him and quietly resumed his dunk-wait-bite, dunk-wait-bite process as he set himself to polishing off his late-night snack.

I simply stared at Costa, my mouth hanging open in stunned surprise at the revelation. "Don't look at me," he said, glancing over his shoulder at his wife. "It was her idea, not mine."

I'd never have thought in a million years anyone would name a child after me. The very thought of it knocked me sideways, and I felt myself blushing as I watched Kelly crack the eggs with a beautiful precision born of practice and drop them onto the sizzling pan. She dialed the burner down a notch and pushed the lever down on the toaster, then turned around.

"If it weren't for you," she said. "I don't think I'd have him…" She gestured towards Costa with a soft jerk of her chin. "Or my beautiful son."

Overwhelmed by feeling and surprise, I took a deep breath. "Whatever I did for him," I told her, my voice suddenly cracking a little as I thought of the four long months Costa and I spent at Walter Reed putting ourselves (and, I guess, each other) back together, "he gave back to me in spades. I know I wouldn't be where I am today if it weren't for him."

The eggs crackled in the pan, shattering the gravity of the moment as Kelly gave a panicked grimace and swiftly turned around to flip them over just as my English muffin popped out of the toaster.

As Kelly was tending to my late supper, I turned back to Costa and his boy. For a minute I just watched my friend play with his son. Costa placed his hand palm-down on the table and splayed his fingers wide, then showed Joey how to play stabscotch, poking his index finger rather than a knife blade between his fingers. As I watched them, I remembered winning twenty bucks and a box of frosted strawberry Pop-Tarts after winning a contest in a barracks tent in Saudi Arabia involving a Gerber knife, an empty wooden ammo crate and a fast-talking sergeant from the battalion motor pool.

"You should take off your clothes," Kelly said abruptly as she placed a plate of three eggs and a amply-buttered English muffin in front of me. Realizing the awkwardness of what she'd just said, she laughed and clarified, "I mean, I'm happy to throw those in the laundry. I think you and Jason wear the same size, so you can just borrow a pair of sweats and a T-shirt while we put those through the wash."

"Ummm." I looked down at myself. "Okay," I said. "But only if you're sure. And, umm, you best put these in all by 'emselves, you know. These are covered with dust, ash, dirt…" I hesitated as I thought about all the God-awful things I'd been swimming in for the last two days. "Asbestos, probably. Heaven only knows what's on this stuff."

With their son sitting there, I wasn't going to go into detail about it all, and from the looks on Kelly's and Costa's faces, I knew there was no need. They knew, at least as much as anyone at that point, in those dark days, would have wanted to know. The three of us exchanged a shared look that lasted long enough that Joey squirmed in his father's lap and leaned his head back into Costa's chest, as if to drag the three of us grown-ups out of our sadness and back into the present.

Kelly took a cue from her son and said, "Eat." I looked down at my late dinner and smiled. She'd overcooked the eggs a little on one side so that the whites got a little bit golden and crispy, just the way I like them. I cut into the flattened yolks and found them still a little orange in the middle—perfectly over-medium as far as I was concerned—and, sprinkling a little bit of salt over them, quickly tucked into the first truly hot meal I'd had in two days.

"Oh my God," I sighed, murmuring a little as I swallowed the first forkful. "These are like the best eggs ever." She cocked a slightly-skeptical eyebrow and smiled. "I'm serious," I said, turning to Costa as I shoved another forkful into my mouth. I don't think I realized until I smelled those eggs in front of me how damn hungry I was. "If you weren't already married," I told her, "I'd marry you myself just for these eggs."

Kelly just laughed. "Okay," she said. "Eat, then we're getting you out of those clothes, throwing those in the wash and I want you to go upstairs and get some sleep. Don't worry—Jason or I will mind your clothes, and we'll rinse those boots off in the tub. You look like you haven't slept since…"

She pursed her lips as she suddenly fell silent.

"Three hours," I said quietly. "Thirty-one hours down there. Three hours of sleep since I got up at five on Tuesday."

"Eat, then change, then sleep," Costa said with a serious nod. "For all you've done, you know—for me, for us, for everybody these last two days—let us do this for you."

I felt a strange swirl of love and sadness and gratitude wash over me at his words. "You really don't—"

"Hey," he said, reaching over and putting his hand on my back, right at the base of my neck. "Let us help you, okay? You and I both know, it'll all be there tomorrow."

"Okay," I whispered.

I long ago decided that sometimes people walk into our lives for a reason. Sometimes what seems to be a coincidence can have a purpose, even if that purpose is invisible to our mortal eyes or beyond our ability to understand. I'm not saying that everything that happens serves an ultimate purpose guided by God's plan. I can't say that Parker or Matthews's deaths or Costa's head injury happened because God in His wisdom wanted those things to happen.

No...

What I mean is that I believe people are sometimes placed in our paths to help us along our way, or so that we can help them along theirs, or—in the case of me and Jason Costa—both. As I look back at the path my life's taken since the afternoon that I rolled into Lieutenant Sauer's physical therapy room at Walter Reed and met Costa, I'm certain that I wouldn't be where or who I am if it weren't for the friendship that took shape in the days and weeks that followed. More than once, God's brought Costa and me together when each of us needed something, and somehow, we were able to help each other find that something we needed.

Bones says it's just a "serendipitous and beneficial coincidence" that Costa and I came into one another's lives when we did.

I like to think of it as a blessing.

* * *

**A/N: **_So there you have it. I hope you found something meaningful in this little tale of young soldiers recovering from their first war._

_Since the story is now complete, I can't bribe or blackmail you with promises of another chapter. I hope, though, that you know by the emotion woven into the story that this tale came from my heart. I would be grateful_ _(more than I can possibly tell you, really)_ _if you would take a moment to share your thoughts now that you've read the tale in full. Please leave a review. _

_Let me take a moment to wish a happy birthday to my friend Angela in Co. Antrim, Northern Ireland. Since 2001, she's felt a little bittersweet having a birthday that fell on the 11th of September. I hope this tale, ending as it did, leaves you with a little lift on a day so full of somber remembrance. You've been a huge support to me over the last couple of years and I truly consider myself blessed by your friendship. Happy birthday, babe._

_**Editorial note**__ (lest someone think this monkey suffered a lapse of Boothiness): You may have noticed the foregoing ignored a relatively minor aspect of the canonical Booth chronology, so if you did, no need to point it out to me—the change was quite deliberate on my part :-) I hope, after reading the chapter, you agree that the slight tweak was tolerable in the service of the larger tale I was trying to tell._


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